Re: orion5x housekeeping
Dear Roger.
On 2016-03-02 06:57, Roger Shimizu wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 2:06 PM, Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br> wrote:
>> Dear Martin and others,
>>
>> On 2015-12-31 00:51, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
>>> I was looking at debian-installer and thought it would be good to see
>>> if there are maintainers (and if not, at least users) for the orion5x
>>> devices we supposedly support.
>>
>> Right.
>>
>>> Looking at debian-installer, I see support for:
>>>
>>> * Buffalo Kurobox Pro: I know various Debian people had these. Are
>>> people still using these devices? Is Debian working? Is the
>>> installer working?
>>
>> I can confirm that the Kurobox Pro is working fine with testing, with
>> kernels 3.16.x and with kernel 4.4.
>
> Thanks for your feedback!
> Good to hear it's working for you!
Oh, and now I have one extra data point: using the xz compression for
the initrd also works very well, apart from its creation being
considerably slower. With the adoption of MODULES=dep and xz
compression, the initrd went from 10MB to 2.8MB.
Not that the Kurobox Pro had problems with the large initrd (it does
have problems with the rest of the userspace slowly growing), but it is
nice to have everything leaner.
If we only could have a leaner compiled samba (say, to only cite one
example), without all the bells and whistles that the current debian
package has, that would be a very good thing for these machines with
128MB of RAM.
>> Now, with kernel 4.4 and recent flash-kernel, everything is working fine.
>
> I guess it's because the updated flash-kernel fixed your previous
> issues with 4.x kernel.
I guess so. If I recall correctly, I had a problem when booting and the
last message was something like "machine id foo unsupported". I can't
remember right now...
> code of Kurobox-Pro didn't changed since long before.
I suppose here that you meant the kernel code, right? I would guess
that, apart from changes in modules like the ethernet module with TSO
being problematic, the rest hasn't changed in a very long while in a
substantial way.
>> I didn't test the installer, though. I may test it soon, depending on
>> availability of my time and interest from other people.
>
> Actually I'm doing some work on the installer for Linkstation
> orion5x/kirkwood recently.
> Hope you can help to test after I finish.
Sure. Just ping me and I will do my best.
> And I plan to write kernel's device tree for Kurobox/Pro.
> Unfortunately, I don't have this device. If you're convenient, you can
> help to test this, too.
I would like to understand this device tree thing a little bit more.
I have a PowerPC-based Kurobox HG that used to have all the MTD
partitions auto-detected and now I have to pass the partition layout by
hand via the command line, which is a bummer.
I know very little about both the device tree and the hardware to know
where to "graft" the subtree related to the MTD partitions on the whole
tree representing the device.
>> Just to be sure, I changed /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf to have
>> the variable MODULES set to dep instead of most, which greatly reduced
>> the size of the initial ramdisk.
>
> Yes, MODULES=dep is enough for most cases for Linkstation.
Yes, the hardware doesn't change that much. :)
> Good to know you also maintain avr-evtd, which works for old powerpc
> based Linkstation.
Yes, besides the plan regarding the device tree thing cited above, I
would also like to:
* Add support for the Kurobox HG to the debian-installer.
* Have native uboot support for the Kurobox HG, so that I can have all
the goodies since 2006 in my bootloader *and* the boot partition being
ext4, instead only ext2.
* I plan on modularizing avr-evtd, separating the parser part of it to
be more robust and making sure that the rest of the daemon actually
works well.
The code for avr-evtd is quite flaky, with way too many global variables
in its only C file and it needs a heavy dose of patience to understand
some parts of the code (and some were just plain wrong).
Despite the fact that this second Kurobox is a powerpc-based one, the
userspace works very well, but I understand that most knowledgeable
people regarding uboot, device trees and so on are here on debian-arm...
Thanks,
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br
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